Connect with us

Search site

Menu

Main menu

January 19, 2007

Presidential Pardon

Thirty years ago this weekend, President Jimmy Carter issued a blanket amnesty for everyone who had resisted the Vietnam War draft.

Today, Dick talks to Dick talks to Fritz Efaw. Fritz was at the center of the campaign to pressure Carter into issuing unconditional amnesty for all war resisters.

Remember the movie "Born on the 4th of July"--the scene where the Tom Cruise's character, Ron Kovic, is about to speak at the Democratic National Convention in 1976?

At that convention, the real Ron Kovic was about to nominate an indicted draft evader to become vice president. That man was Fritz Efaw.

Dick talks with Fritz about how he went from draft dodger to vice presidential nominee.

Fritz Efaw is now a professor of political economy at the University of Tennessee in Chattanooga. He says that the principled opposition to the war in Vietnam has made it easier for people to criticize the war in Iraq today.

NOTHING IS EVER AS IT SEEMS

David Spear was a newspaper editor when at the age of 50 he decided to do something new. He thought about painting, but once he tried photography, he was hooked.

His first book, "The Neugents," featured an intimate view of a rural family. After that book was published, David moved to Mexico on a whim. His latest book, "Visible Spirits," is inspired by his new life in Mexico.

David talks to Dick about girls cradling fish, youngsters holding ravens and other near-mythical stories from Mexico.

A 1992 recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship, David's photographs are now in the permanent collections of museums across the nation, including the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the New Orleans Museum of Art, and the Museum of Fine Art in Houston.

Music:

Music heard in the show: I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die Rag by Country Joe & The Fish for the album I Feel Like I'm Fixin' to Die

When Craig James started collecting 19th century photographs of African Americans who had once been enslaved, he had no idea he'd find a preserved image of his own ancestor, his great-great-great grandmother Nursey James. Also on the show: a woman's decision to freeze her eggs.

Shigeko Sasamori was 13 years old on August 6, 1945. At 8:15 AM she was working with her junior high classmates clearing the streets of Hiroshima, Japan. She looked up into the clear blue sky when she heard a plane flying overhead and saw something white dropping to the earth. Shigeko was less than a mile from the center of the explosion caused by the world's first atomic bomb. Somehow, Shigeko survived. Also in this episode: photographer David Spear.

As Japan tries to contain the crisis at the Fukashima Daiichi Nuclear Plant, the world remembers another nuclear disaster, Chernobyl. This week marks the 25th anniversary of the explosion. Ursula Sladek was a young mother in Germany in 1986, when radiation was detected in her town. Also in this episode, Dr. Elena Bodnar lived in the Chernobyl area and treated children there. The experience shaped her career, both as a physician and an inventor.